Potable water is essential, with quality and safety standards regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in accordance with the Public Water System Supervision program. The standards are enforced by local agencies. There are over 170,000 water districts in the United States which provide public drinking water to 90% of Americans.
The EPA has primary standards designed to protect public health against substances that may be harmful to humans if consumed. EPA secondary standards ensure the aesthetic qualities of water such as taste, odor, or clarity. However, each water district remains responsible for monitoring the drinking water itself to ensure that it meets all drinking water standards. The treatment processes for the drinking water must be monitored as well.
In order to comply with the regulatory testing calendar, water districts are required to report a battery of analytical test results varying from quarterly to yearly, depending on the source of the water supply. Water systems must monitor their drinking water to ensure that it is safe for their customers. Monitoring schedules differ according to the type of contaminants that may be present in a given water supply. The quarterly tests are typically chlorine and turbidity, which can be accomplished with automatic analyzers. Water districts use electronic sensors to monitor the amount of storage, discharge pressure and flow from the systems on a daily basis. Other parameters which are not automatically sensored, but rather are determined by analytical tests, are reported to regulatory agencies on a periodic basis.
Municipal water may be obtained from any source, including seawater, all of which can be made potable by use of proper water treatment equipment. For instance, a reverse osmosis system is capable of lowering the total dissolved solids of sea water to drinking water levels. Despite the sophistication of pretreatment, improper operation can lead to fouled membranes. If fouling occurs but is found quickly, the membranes may be cleaned averting water contamination and associated water treatment repairs. However, if the fouling is not detected quickly, the water treatment system can be irreparably damaged and lead to human health concerns.
One of the problems with maintaining advanced processing equipment is a need for highly qualified individuals. Employment of a full time staff is costly and can be problematic since such monitoring is repetitive and highly qualified individuals can easily become bored. For this reason, all water treatment processes include a large assortment of strategically placed sensors that are typically incorporated into a computer system capable of comparing the sensor values against a pre-set quality level. However, if the operator does not recognize a particular alarm condition, the elaborate array of monitoring equipment is useless.
Municipal water treatment plants are ultimately the responsibility of elected officials. Yet these officials rarely have the technical training or time to allow them to directly access the performance parameters of the systems for which they are responsible. The present invention could easily be used to provide a readily understandable presentation of the current performance of a municipal water treatment system which was fully accessible by the elected officials as well as plant operators, at any time via the Internet, but which provided no access to the control system of the water treatment plant. In addition, in this application of the technology, the same presentation of the system performance could be made accessible to the public at large, allowing interested members of the public to monitor the operation of their own drinking water plants as desired.
Thus, what is lacking in the art, is a means for monitoring water treatment processes in a cost effective manner by highly trained personnel providing regulatory reporting with a real time analysis that can be simultaneously viewed and verified at any time by multiple parties, from any location having access to the Internet, but which provided no access to the control system of the water treatment plant.